I’ve begun working on a new project to develop a series of slides targeted to Hispanic students to create awareness of those Library resources and services that could be useful in their studies and activities. Carol emphasizes that they should not crossover into the Bibliographers’ realm and, interestingly enough, this becomes the most important consideration as I begin to gather my resources.

As I look through other Universities’ and organizations' websites and their resources for Hispanics, I constantly find what are more accurately resources for students of Hispanic and Latin American studies: Hispanic journals and databases, biographical and bibliographical encyclopedias, etc. I find little or nothing on general resources to help Spanish-speaking students get ahead in the academic environment, regardless of what subjects they’re studying.

Thinking of my own experiences as an undergraduate student in the United States, I identify areas where I know I would have appreciated some extra help (at the end of my first semester my department advisor pointed out that I had to work on my writing which was weak and awkward.) The most obvious are general language resources - especially those having to do with writing (vocabulary, grammar etc.) I find those dealing with slang and colloquial expressions would also have been useful to get over the initial ‘culture shock.’ If I had studied today, the technological terminology in English would have boggled my mind, so I also search for some good resources.

It’s a challenge for most students to navigate the catalog and the databases, so I can only imagine how doubly hard it must be for new Spanish-speaking students. Carol indicates that EBSCO has a Spanish-language interface (I had never noticed!) and I find other databases do too and make a list. We find them to be inconsistent, however, – search field terms are only in English and the Help sections are still not available in Spanish. Still, this might be a helpful feature. I’m still not sure if it would be useful to point students to the online search tutorials since these are in English.

I’m also finding Career resources - grants, fellowships for Hispanics, Hispanic-area businesses and people. And for leisure, because it’s always nice to feel connected to one’s roots, I’m thinking of including something about the Latin American Video Collection and some literature.

After this week’s session with Carol at the Reference Desk the project has engendered another phase, which is indentifying Writing resources to include in the Reference Services section of the Library webpage.